


promise me you'll get out of here someday?

by buckynatalia



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Angst, Blood, Brainwashing, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 13:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5668426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckynatalia/pseuds/buckynatalia





	promise me you'll get out of here someday?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MarshyOfTheBlobs](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=MarshyOfTheBlobs).



 

 

—

 

  MOSCOW, 1962

 

 

  The sun filtered in through the dirty windows like something forbidden. Golden, it rested on his eyelashes. On the wool blanket. Sunshine melted the frost on the windows, illuminating half of James’ face.  He looked like he could have been angelic, once. Something fallen, something found.

 

  “Good morning,” he said softly, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.

 

  “‘Morning,” I said, smiling. There was something alien about the stillness of the moment, how warm I felt curled here in the sunlight. Snow piled up outside on the fire escape, and in the distance the city was blackened with soot. Not here. Here we tried to forget. We were weapons, weren’t we? Weapons didn’t yearn for a future of brightness and warm arms to come home to. Home wasn’t meant for us.

 

  The Red Room, Department X, HYDRA, whomever they were. They wanted us irreparably broken. Shattered pieces were easier to manipulate, I knew that. But we were healing ourselves from the inside out. We were surviving, and that in itself was a small rebellion.

 

  I glanced over at him. “James?”

 

  “Natalia,” he said, rolling my name around in his mouth like hard candy, the kind that stains your tongue. I’d never been the girl with the soft edges and the sugary-sweet lips. Maybe someday I’d evolve into kindness. That day was not today. Soon I’d leave this bed and venture out into the cold hard world. A stranger’s blood would spill. I wasn’t the soft girl I could have been.

 

  I ran my fingers over the rift between his metal arm and the jagged flesh of his shoulder. 

 

  “Promise me you’ll get out of here one day,” I said softly.

 

   He looked at me intently. I was a puzzle with no matching pieces and he was still trying to put me back together. Foolish boy with a heart of gold. He taught me how to shoot a man from miles away, how to speak half a dozen languages and shatter a spine with one strike. We dragged each other into the delusion called hope. Maybe that was what love was. I didn’t know.

 

  “Nat, you shouldn’t say things like that,” he said, meant to be a warning yet his eyes were soft. We both knew there was ears everywhere, ears where they shouldn’t be. His eyelashes brushed his cheekbones, for a moment, as he glanced down. They were always watching us.

 

  I locked my eyes onto his. “Will you?"

 

  “One day,” he echoed, after a moment. It was the closest to a vow he’d ever say. Right now, it was enough. A few minutes later, we would pull ourselves out of bed and into the freezing air, loading our guns for the solo missions we each had laid out for us. We both knew that this day wouldn’t be kind. There was always a chance one of us wouldn’t make it back. “One day I’ll try.”

 

   Fifteen minutes later, the two of us stood on the curb, hardly feeling the bitterly cold wind whipping around us. His arm was covered by thick gloves and a utility jacket, my hair covered with a coarse shawl. The factory district where his apartment was sat empty and gray. No one was to be seen. We could have been anyone, two charcoal smudges amongst the white snow. 

 

  “Nat?” he asked.

 

   I allowed myself a smile. “James.”

 

  “Come back in one piece,” he said, and when he smiled there was only a little bitterness in it.

 

  “You too."

 

  He dissolved into the city and we seemed like strangers, right then. He didn’t say, stay safe. He didn’t say, stay alive. We promised to stay in one piece. So the scientists would have something to take apart. So we could sneak into the morgue and cradle each other one last time. I didn't blame him.

 

\- - - - 

 TWO WEEKS LATER

 

 

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I told him, rasping out the words like the toxic smoke that curled from his cigarette. Just the one, poised between his fingers, meeting his lips again. Snowflakes drifted down and dusted his hair, melted into the bruises on his skin. His head lolled against the brick wall of the alleyway where we stood. He was too damn pretty for his own good.

 

   “I know,” he said, seeming to study me. My dress hung limp and shining under a heavy workman’s coat, pointe shoes shoved into oversize combat boots so the soles wouldn’t soak through. There was eyeliner smudged under one eye and the powder on my face began to shift and fall. He didn’t care. James was looking at me like a miracle, like he was a madman who fell in love with the moon. 

 

  “Cigarette?” he said, offering me the one he’d just lit.

 

  “You know, these things could kill you,” I said, taking it between my fingers. I inhaled the musky smoke and exhaled a large cloud, something to get lost in. He was much too close now, close enough to reach out and touch. But we were inclosed. Like a prison, like in a museum, someone’s always watching us. Don’t touch the art. 

 

  “You should quit them,” I breathed, handing it back. 

 

  “Couldn’t bear to,” he said, starry-eyed. There were dusty rose lipstick stains on the white paper. By now he knew I wasn’t talking about the cigarettes, not really, he was talking about me. Something in my ribcage rattled, warm. Something like love. 

 

  There was no happy endings here.

 

  He reached out and took my hand, a stolen touch, my slim fingers between his icy steel ones. For a long moment I felt timeless, like perhaps we’d be solidified in amber and live in golden sunlight until the end of time. A couple pressed between paper. No blood on our hands, never again. His hand cupped my cheek and I felt warm, for once, in this honey-tinted dark.

 

  All of a sudden he tensed. A wolf ready to flee, ready to bite.  

 

  “They’re coming,” he said, gripping my hand. Dropping my hand. 

 

  He fled into the dark, or was dragged.

 

  —————

 

 

  I woke up in a hospital bed, held up by the seething dark. Cold ran through my veins like I’d been injected with the northern winds. Blood seeped from the crook of my elbow, pooling on the paper beneath me. In my drug-laced dreams, this pool of blood turned into oceans and I sailed them as far as I could. But somehow I could never get away.

 

  Days I waited in that room, sometimes swimming in and out of consciousness, sometimes with faceless scientists wresting the energy from my wrecked body. Taking samples, measurements. I was an hourglass with all the sand spilled out. They reminded me how important I was. But I knew that I was nothing but a tool in their hands. 

 

  At least I was sharp.

 

  Once they let me alone for hours, perhaps even days. Strapped to a table with nothing but the cold for company. I started to think widely, like I might have when I was a little girl, of all the things the world had to offer. There were places where the sun always shined. Or where crumbling palaces became overgrown with vines and banana trees. There were people who’d known nothing but the chaos of total freedom, sweet air in their lungs, a family to come home to. I yearned for that.

 

  Someone with vinegar breath and rough hands removed my IV. They were not gentle. 

 

  “Agent Romanova, you’re free to go. Thank you for your service.”

 

  My throat was too dry to reply. They probably didn’t want me to, either, I was to be seen and not heard. Not unless I brought good news. There was no good news, just a pounding headache and an empty stomach. I waited for the metallic click of the door and then stood on wobbly legs. Gone. I didn’t feel like myself, really, as I dressed in the plain black clothes they’d left for me. I felt unreal, drifting away.

 

  The door was unlocked and the hall was deserted. Cement floors stretching into nowhere. Fluorescent lights droned over my head, forever off-white and blank. I walked and walked. I had been here before, tread this path, but when? Some parts of my mind were nothing but dust.

 

 But I had seen things I wanted to forget. Men’s faces turning purple as my hands wrested the air from their lungs. The scarring that bullets left when they tore through skin, the puckered skin looking like craters on the moon. When I was fourteen, my first love bled out in a ditch. At least he let me hold him as the darkness closed in. At least he cut me a ribbon from his uniform, pressed it into my blood-stained hand and told me to remember. 

 

  I stilled, breathing in the antiseptic smell of the hallway. The small hairs at the back of my neck stood up. Under the hospital smell was something like burnt feathers. It was the smell of loss, electrified. I turned down a narrow hallway with dozens of locked doors lining it. The burnt smell was overwhelming. I knew I could be punished for sticking my nose in places it shouldn’t be, but it didn’t matter anymore.

 

  That rancid burning smell came from an electromagnetic brainwashing tool. They strapped you down and edited your memories to their hearts’ delight. When they used it on you, you lost yourself. I knew firsthand.

 

   I hadn’t seen James in more than a week.

 

  The door was made of thick wood, likely a deadbolt installed in it too. My hand curled around the dull metal of the handle. Locked. I breathed in sharply, standing and assessing the door for a moment. 

 

  I exhaled and there was a sickening crack as I kicked down the door. The wood splintered, the metal bent, and it swung open.

 

  James sat strapped to a chair. There were electrodes connected to his bare chest, winding off to nowhere. His temples slicked with sweat. He looked like a bird too broken to fly away, decaying where it sat. Three men had their guns trained directly at my head, ready to blow my brains out if I so much as flinched. 

 

  “You’d best be on your way, Agent Romanova,” one of them warned.

 

  “Apologies, comrade,” I said, and backed away. Their muscles relaxed, guns lolling against their legs.

 

   I dropped to the floor and kicked out the first man’s feet. He fell, his skull cracking on the cement floor. I lashed out and struck the gun from the other man’s hand, and it clattered down near my shoes. I raised it, pointing the barrel at the other man before disarming him, too. A swift kick to the head and he passed out, too. 

 

  Their chair sat in the middle of the room, illuminated by a single lamp.

 

  “You shouldn’t be here,” said James, wiping blood from his mouth. They’d beat him. For answers or for their own sick pleasure. Anger surged just beneath my skin, like hives were about to break out. His voice was rough. “Natalia, you have to go."

 

  But he still remembered me. I wasn’t too late. 

 

  “No, we have to get you out of here,” I said, pulling at the steel clamps that held him down. My nails peeled back as I pulled and scratched, growing desperate. I drew blood from my dry fingers but there was nothing to be done. He needed to get out, he needed to — 

 

  “Nat,” he said again, an echo. He was only inches away, looking like something from a dream, the kind that left you aching when you woke up alone. He smiled, just a little. “Leave me here.”

 

  I knew that I’d have to.

 

  Maybe it could have been different. If he had never left his home and I’d never washed blood from my hands. We would have been good. Him and me, wandering the streets until daybreak. In another world, we could have followed each other to the end of the Earth. We’d see rainfall. No one would be watching us, never again. 

 

  If only I wasn’t deadly and if he wasn’t so wicked sharp. But we were. We were here, in this room where he’d forget every single thing I’d ever said to him. I’d be gone. Just a whisper at the back of his mind, driving him insane. Some wounds never healed, did they?

 

  “You were the realest thing I ever touched,” he said, his voice low and tremulous. “You’re more honest than I’ll ever be, hell, a better liar than me too. You were the one good thing in all of it, and I can’t thank you enough. So run from here, milii moi. Burn the whole world down, if you have to.”

 

  An alarm started to blare overhead. Flashing lights and pounding boots in the distance. All of it seemed dull in comparison to the glowing of his skin and the fire behind his eyes. I’d hardly noticed the wetness of my cheeks.

 

  I leaned forward and kissed his forehead, strands of my hair brushing softly against his face. He looked up at me with wide eyes, he was a work of art buried in a fallen city, he was the beauty of rubble when the sun rose after an earthquake. I still remembered the first time I saw him, shining silver like moonglow and giving me one hell of a bruise to remember him by. A month later I blackened his eye and kissed him behind an abandoned factory. There was soot on his skin. Snow in my hair. 

 

  He was the only person who saw me as I really was. Instead of the legend, instead of the monster, he saw a girl who only ever wanted to be free. No chains and no contracts. He loved me and now we were ashes, we were dust. 

 

  I reached out and took his hand in mine. “I’ll give ‘em hell, don’t worry. Just — "

 

   The boots closed in and the alarm blared louder than ever. Smoke spilled through the room, black-masked soldiers flooding in like ants. Injected something like venom into my veins and I fell to the floor screaming, writhing. His chin jerked back as they powered on the machine, invisible hands forcing me to watch James deteriorate before my eyes. He cried out once. In agony or pain or loss I didn’t know.

 

   And then he was gone.

 

 ———————


End file.
